Brazil Is the New America: How Brazil Offers Upward Mobility in a Collapsing World (18 page)

The scary part of this forecast is that it incorporates a projection of a “solar hibernation” not seen for centuries. Interestingly, the hibernation hypothesis was supported by NASA's Long Range Solar Forecast through 2022, published in 2006, “The Sun's Great Conveyor Belt has slowed to a record-low crawl,” said NASA solar physicist David Hathaway on May 10, 2006. “It's off the bottom of the charts. Solar Cycle 25, peaking around the year 2022, could be one of the weakest in centuries.”
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In the unlikely event that Al Gore is right, the economic impact of climate change would largely be felt in the form of falling prices for food as warmer weather extends growing seasons. But if the astrophysicists are right, we could experience the greatest crisis in history as protracted crop failures multiply food prices at a time when there are billions more mouths to feed than ever before. This could write down living standards in the way that colder weather seems to have toppled the prosperity of the Roman Empire.

The evidence of colder weather is not merely theoretical, as you know if you follow the news. The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed the single fastest temperature change ever recorded. Contrary to predictions by global warming alarmists, however, temperatures fell rather than rose. In December 2010, Fort Lauderdale broke a 162-year low temperature record, and snow fell in Jacksonville, Florida. Meanwhile, I-5, one of Southern California's iconic freeways, was closed at the beginning of 2011 for almost two days by heavy snows. The early months of 2011 saw Europe submerged in a deep freeze, with heavy snow blanketing the continent, causing transportation delays and raising heating costs. And no review of colder weather would be complete without reference to the informing irony that marked the UN's Cozumel Conference on Global Warming—three successive days with all-time record low temperatures for that part of Mexico. You can't make this up.

Equally, it would be hard to exaggerate the food deficit that would likely accompany a return to Little Ice Age conditions, such as those that characterized the seventeenth century. In the cold climate countries, field crops would either suffer persistently low yields or not grow at all. Farming would become a more industrial activity, undertaken at greater expense in heated greenhouses. Even where outdoor agriculture could be pursued in what are currently temperate climates, it would become more expensive and energy intensive. Consequently, meat consumption would necessarily recede as livestock feed costs soared.

Food prices would skyrocket, much as they did in 1816, now remembered for “the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world.” For further background, consider this passage from Willie Soon and Steven Yaskell's “Year Without a Summer,” which recounts how “a weak solar maximum, a major volcanic eruption, and possibly even the wobbling of the Sun conspired to make the summer of 1816 one of the most miserable ever recorded.”
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They write: “The year 1816 is still known to scientists and historians as ‘eighteen hundred and froze to death' or the ‘year without a summer.' It was the locus of a period of natural ecological destruction not soon to be forgotten. During that year, the Northern Hemisphere was slammed with the effects of at least two abnormal but natural phenomena” including the Dalton Minimum, one of the sun's extended periods of low magnetic activity resembling the Maunder Minimum and sandwiched within the Little Ice Age that lasted from the fourteenth through nineteenth centuries, and the eruption of Tambora on the island of Sumbawa (located in modern-day Indonesia). In addition, Soon and Yaskell write about a third factor called inertial solar motion (characterized by the sun shifting its place in the solar system), which also might have played a role in the climate's change.

In a repeat of the Maunder Minimum today, residents of most of the advanced cold climate economies would be faced with a food price shock more pronounced than that which provoked the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011. Ultimately, they would face the unpalatable choice of consuming costly domestic foods, partially produced in industrial greenhouses or importing high-priced conventional foodstuffs from Brazil, and perhaps a few other warm weather countries, where there is a reserve capacity for additional food production. Obviously, a deep freeze in the global climate would sharply reduce the apparent productivity advantage of farming in temperate zones and increase the attractiveness of farming in tropical and subtropical savannahs.

It is not overheating, but record-setting colder temperatures that accounted for the destruction of up to 40 percent of Mexico's winter wheat crop in 2011.
27
The story from
Vanguardia
reports “catastrophic” losses to Mexican wheat due to “frost.”
28

A moment's consideration of the impact of climate upheavals on human history will convince the thinking person that the danger of a shift to colder weather vastly exceeds the supposed dangers of global warming, which is only another phrase for good weather.

I believe that Gore's views and indeed the whole global warming hysteria are based on dubious science. Gore maintains that governments have the capacity to dictate global temperatures by altering carbon emissions. This is a sweeping proposition that implies a heretofore unimagined capacity of government intervention. However, the identification of manmade carbon emissions as the crucial variable in climate change is difficult to square with solar physics, and much that history, archaeology, and geology tell us about the actual record of climate in the past.

If you listen to Gore and the global warming alarmists, you might suppose that CO
2
made up a big proportion of the total atmosphere and was put there recently by humans burning oil and coal to power a lavish, modern standard of living. This supposition is wrong.

Roughly 186 billion tons of CO
2
enter the atmosphere annually. Of that amount, only about 6 billion tons or 3.3 percent is attributable to human activity—apart from breathing.
29
Note, however that about 71 billion tons of CO
2
are exhaled by humans and animals in the course of breathing. This accounts for more than 10 times the CO
2
attributable to economic activity that Gore wants to squelch.

Based on Gore's and Obama's push for sweeping and costly climate legislation, you might think that atmospheric CO
2
had reached unprecedented levels. Wrong again. Atmospheric carbon has previously been 25 to 100 times higher than current levels—with no evidence that it caused runaway greenhouse effects, much less any of the other horrifying hypotheticals that Gore and the remorseless liars in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the UN pretend to be alarmed about.

This is not merely the opinion of an eccentric holdout for the lost virtues of a liberal education. There are mounds of evidence compiled by reputable scientists who are not being paid large government grants to inflame alarms about anthropomorphic global warming. In 2011 alone, the U.S. government spent some $4 billion to show that “carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, will almost certainly contribute to additional widespread climate disruption.”
30
As this comment shows, there is scarcely even a pretense of objective intent to study whether or to what extent CO
2
emissions actually alter the climate.
31
They are simply paying billions a year out of an empty pocket to purchase propaganda with footnotes that says what they want to hear. It is remarkable therefore that there are still independent-minded scientists who are prepared to follow their research to conclusions that the powers that be do not wish to hear.

Dr. Jan Veizer, an eminent isotype geochemist, has demonstrated from analysis of seawater that there has been no relationship between atmospheric carbon and temperatures over the past 545 million years. That's how far back he and his colleagues have measured the amounts of various chemicals found in marine shells from around the world.

These reveal major changes that took place in oxygen isotopes in seawater, a key indicator of changes in atmospheric composition and temperature. Looking over that long time scale, exceeding half a billion years, atmospheric carbon showed no correlation to temperature. None. Indeed, there was nothing about having much higher CO
2
concentrations that prevented the earth from plunging into Ice Ages. Equally, evidence suggests that global temperatures are now 7 degrees Celsius cooler than they were for most of the past 500 million years.

The long record correlating CO
2
to temperature also shows that high amounts of atmospheric CO
2
are transient phenomena. Contrary to Gore and company, there is no tendency for “runaway” CO
2
concentrations to increase and cause detrimental climate change. Past increases in CO
2
emissions due to volcanic eruptions dwarf those now attributable to human activity. Contrary to claims by the IPCC that high atmospheric CO
2
persists, carbon dioxide is naturally recycled by the earth.

This is something that any thinking environmentalist should understand. CO
2
is bioactive. It is not a pollutant. CO
2
is an essential ingredient to life. After all, you are a carbon-based life-form. There is a high probability that some of the organic carbon in your body was recycled from atmospheric CO
2
. CO
2
is crucially important to plant nutrition. It is also captured in marine life. Seashells and coral reefs are composed largely of the mineral calcite (calcium carbonate: CaCO
3
) recycled from atmospheric CO
2
. What was once atmospheric CO
2
is assimilated into vegetation and soil. Eventually, it finds its way into sedimentary rocks, like limestone. From there, limestone is sometimes turned into cement and concrete and formed into everything from sidewalks to skyscrapers.

Looking into the evidence, it is far from obvious that there is currently an excess of CO
2
in the atmosphere. To the contrary, CO
2
comprises just 1/10,000th more of the atmosphere today than it did in 1750 before the Industrial Revolution. Far from being alarmingly high, atmospheric CO
2
is within a tiny margin of its lowest level ever.

The idea that there is some pressing emergency that requires drastic action to slash carbon emissions is remote from the facts. Claims to the contrary have involved hysterics over manufactured evidence and some astonishing intellectual contortions. Consider the solemn forecast proclaimed by the IPCC in 2007 that global warming due to carbon emissions would melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. Oops. They had to retract this whopper after it became known that the prediction was just an arbitrary assertion unsupported by any formal research.

This is by no means the only example of bogus evidence of a global warming crisis that has been promulgated by the IPCC. In 2001, the IPCC published its famous “hockey stick” graph that purported to show that 1998 was the warmest year in the warmest decade of the past millennium. This conclusion was drawn entirely from a paper by a recent graduate, who earned much fame and fortune by contradicting thousands of studies and innumerable historic records showing that the climate was far warmer during the centuries of the Medieval Warm Period.

Like the warning of melting Himalayan glaciers, the hockey stick temperature graph had to be withdrawn by the IPCC after two Canadian scientists, Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, showed that the temperature data upon which it was based was rife with errors.
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In theory, the IPCC was set up to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change. The reality is that the IPCC doesn't care a fig about scientific truth. They are only interested in promoting hysteria over atmospheric carbon as a justification for one of the great power grabs in history—a power grab. (More on this to come.)

In my view, evidence is strong that human carbon emissions play no more than a trivial role in global warming—if indeed there is any such warming to explain. But suspend judgment on that. Suppose for a moment that Gore is right, and global climate can indeed be determined by political diktat.

You would think that if you believed that the world's governments could dial up or down the global climate like revelers spinning the thermostat at a Super Bowl party, that the first topic for discussion would be to determine what the optimum global temperature is. And the answer is. . .

Don't hold your breath. A telling detail of the climate debate is that Gore, Obama, the IPCC, and other climate vigilantes are adamant that they have the capacity to regulate climate, and that they must do so urgently. But they have nothing to say about the ideal temperature they intend to dial in on the global thermostat.

I think their silence on this score betrays the gag. So long as the battle against global warming is a self-righteous campaign to Save the Planet, it requires no further justification.

No one need apologize for fending off the grab bag of horrors forecast by Gore and company, ranging from endless reruns of Hurricane Katrina, if not the tornado scene from the
Wizard of Oz
, to the inundation of coastal cities, including New York and Miami (Gore says sea levels will rise by 20 feet by the end of this century) to a global epidemic of malaria and dengue fever, “the destruction of Mt. Everest,” heat stroke for polar bears and the desertification of Australia and Africa.

We can all agree that those things don't sound good. No one wants to get malaria, dengue fever, or heat stroke. And it certainly would not do much for the collateral of the banking system if Miami, lower Manhattan, Charleston, New Orleans, Tampa, Los Angeles, San Diego, New Orleans, Washington, Baltimore, and other low-lying cities were wholly or partially underwater.